GEO glossary
The terms you will meet in AI search and Generative Engine Optimization, defined in one or two sentences each.
- GEO
- AEO
- Google AI Overviews
- Mention rate
- Citation
- Citation source
- Entity
- Prompt set
- AI crawler
- llms.txt
- Structured data
- Answer-first content
- AI referral traffic
- Zero-click search
- GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
- The practice of improving how often and how accurately AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews mention, recommend and cite a business or brand in their answers.
- AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)
- A closely related term for optimising content to be selected as the direct answer by search features and AI assistants. In practice GEO and AEO are often used interchangeably.
- Google AI Overviews
- AI-generated summaries shown at the top of some Google search results, with links to the sources used. Google AI Mode is a separate, conversational search experience built on the same idea.
- Mention rate
- The share of sampled AI answers to a given prompt that name your business. Because AI answers vary between runs, mention rate is measured over several samples rather than a single answer.
- Citation
- A source link that an AI assistant shows alongside its answer. Being cited means the AI used your page, or a page about you, as evidence.
- Citation source
- A third-party website that AI assistants frequently cite for a topic, such as a review site, directory, forum thread or news article. Appearing accurately on these sources is a core part of GEO.
- Entity
- A distinct, identifiable thing — such as your company — that search engines and AI models recognise. Entity consistency means your name, description, location and services match everywhere they appear online.
- Prompt set
- The list of questions used to test AI visibility, written the way real customers ask them. A good prompt set for Southeast Asia includes local phrasing, place names and languages.
- AI crawler
- An automated agent that fetches web pages for an AI company. Examples include GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot and Claude-SearchBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot (Perplexity) and Google-Extended (a Google control token).
- llms.txt
- A proposed plain-text file at a website root that summarises the site and links its key pages for large language models. It complements, but does not replace, robots.txt and sitemaps.
- Structured data (schema markup)
- Machine-readable information added to a web page, usually as JSON-LD using the schema.org vocabulary, describing things like an organisation, a service, a product or an FAQ.
- Answer-first content
- A writing pattern where the direct answer to a question appears in the first sentence or paragraph, followed by detail. It makes content easier for AI assistants to quote accurately.
- AI referral traffic
- Website visits that arrive from AI assistants, identifiable by referrers such as chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com, copilot.microsoft.com and claude.ai.
- Zero-click search
- A search where the user gets their answer without clicking any result, increasingly common with AI-generated answers. It is why being named in the answer itself matters.
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